


The Halcyon Days of Alcedo Attis

by notkingyet



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Fisher King, Huldra, M/M, OMC - Freeform, Orgasm Control, Orgasm Delay, Post-Canon, Xeno, Yuleporn, weird fairy sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 15:46:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5462195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notkingyet/pseuds/notkingyet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Raven King's Book of Magic has been stolen. Childermass goes to retrieve it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Halcyon Days of Alcedo Attis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Arithanas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arithanas/gifts).



> "...There is nothing else in magic but the wild thought of the bird as it casts itself into the void. There is no creature upon the earth with such potential for magic. Even the least of them may fly straight out of this world and come by chance to the Other Lands. Where does the wind come from that blows upon your face, that fans the pages of your book? Where the harum-scarum magic of small wild creatures meets the magic of Man, where the language of the wind and the rain and the trees can be understood, there we will find the Raven King..."
> 
> — Thomas Lanchester, _Treatise concerning the Language of Birds_ , Chapter 6

It was not the first time Vinculus had disappeared. Childermass doubted it would be the last. However, it was the first time Childermass's efforts with his silver basin revealed not a public house or a gay lady's boudoir, but Vinculus alone in a round, stone-walled chamber with no doors or windows.

Vinculus looked well enough considering the circumstances. His limbs were unbound, leaving his arms free to shake his clenched fists at the dirt ceiling and his legs free to kick at the stone walls, bringing showers of soil down upon his head.

Childermass found the ceiling most interesting. Thin, gnarled roots hung down from it, trembling as Vinculus delivered his vicious blows. More interesting than the roots were the softly glowing violet crystals embedded in it to provide the room’s illumination.

Knowing Vinculus, he'd probably done something deserving of the treatment he now received. Childermass had half a mind to leave him to it. However, there remained the matter of Vinculus's skin, and the valuable text contained thereupon. The Learned Society of York Magicians had just begun to study the Raven King’s book and would very much prefer if it didn’t disappear at odd hours without warning. Taking a dim view of Vinculus as an individual, they were content to leave Childermass as his keeper. Even if they hadn’t, Childermass was loath to let anyone steal such a singular relic of the Raven King from him.

So Childermass cast the Winchester Compass.[1] For the first time in nearly four hundred years, it worked. Childermass held it out on front of him. What had once been the minute hand of his watch spun in frantic counter-clockwise circles, then settled in to point at the full-length mirror in his garret, the only semblance of luxury in the Spartan surroundings. Childermass took the hint and stepped onto the King’s Roads.

The Compass led Childermass on a winding path down the Roads and brought him to an irregular oval. He stepped up to it and peered through to see if he could perceive anything of note. All he saw was a grey fog. He gently pushed his hand through the portal. Nothing sinister occurred. Only a chill nip of a breeze on his knuckles. A dry breeze, which was odd, considering the fog. He withdrew his hand and rubbed the rough pads of his fingers together, squinting at the lack of moisture. Curious. Yet more curious things had happened, in England and Faerie both. He wiped his dry hand on his dusty coat and stepped through the opening between worlds.

Childermass, like most people, had prior experience in the phenomenon of misjudging a staircase—putting a foot down too hard in expectation of another stair in the sequence, only to find one has reached the bottom or top of the staircase in question and is now lurching across a flat surface. As disorienting a sensation as it was on a staircase, it was still more disorienting to encounter it when there were no stairs whatsoever.

Which is to say, when Childermass stepped through the irregular portal, his long, heavy stride came down on air.

Having already shifted his weight forward in anticipation of stepping onto something, Childermass couldn’t halt his momentum. He fell forward and spun two hundred and seventy degrees, like a minute hand around three-quarters of a clockface. His head swam as his equilibrium re-oriented to the ninety-degree shift in gravity. Then the heel of his boot struck mud. He stumbled and slid, arms pinwheeling. Once he felt sure he could stand without immediately falling, he righted himself and looked up and around.

Under his feet lay a dried-up riverbed. Its banks rose up on either side, twenty or thirty feet deep, and curved away in front of him, blocking his view of the horizon. Above his head rolled a flat grey sky. Behind him he found a puddle, the only water in sight.

Childermass put the pieces together: the irregular puddle had been the portal, and he’d unwittingly stepped up into the world from ground-level even as he stepped forward from his perspective in the King’s Roads. The fog he’d seen had been the distant sky.

Having solved the mystery, Childermass brought out the Compass again. It led him up and over the riverbank. The climb left his clothes and hands muddied. At the end of his ascent he transferred the mud on his hands to the tops of his thighs, giving his breeches up for lost, and moved on.

Like the sky, the rest of the world beyond the riverbed was grey. The fog seemed to muffle the land, for there was no sound beyond the faint whistle of a cold breeze and the crunch of dried-up marsh grasses being crushed to dust under Childermass’s boots. What had once been a forest loomed on the horizon, bare branches sticking the thick gray clouds like so many pins in a cushion. Between Childermass and the forest stood a single tumbledown tower of grey stone slightly darker than the sky and barely taller than the smallest of the trees. Thornbushes surrounded it in lieu of a wall and grew up over its south-facing side. They left a powdery bed of dried-up petals strewn beneath their knotted vines.

As decrepit as everything looked to Childermass’s eyes now, he couldn’t imagine it looked much more impressive in full bloom. The tower would remain small, and the land itself would remain hemmed-in by the forest. This particular patch of Faerie had never been a powerful seat.

Something stirred in the corner of Childermass’s eye. Childermass turned towards it. A dead willow tree bent over the dry riverbed. Its gnarled tendrils, a match for Childermass’s own ragged black locks, swayed more than the wisp of a breeze over the land would allow. Childermass put his fingertips to the handle of his pistol under his coat and waited.

The thing in the tree twitched again, and Childermass saw it for what it was. Amongst the willow’s dark branches lay a spindly, vaguely boy-shaped creature with more limbs than any boy ought to have. Its face was in shadow, but in one of its too-many hands it dangled a thread down over the dry river, as if it expected to catch a fish. Or something else.

But the Compass led Childermass towards the tower in the opposite direction.

As Childermass had previously observed, the tower appeared to be the crumbling remains of a military outpost. It was built rather like the rook on a chessboard, if said rook were dropped on the floor, crushed under a heel, then picked up and whittled away with an idle pen-knife. Its uppermost floor had lost most of its wall. The skeletal innards wore a cloak of dead ivy. Half a floor and a rickety staircase of eroded stone remained exposed to the cold, grey air. The stair spiraled down into the lower floors, which retained their walls and hid themselves from the world’s view. At the very base of the tower the ivy’s overgrown origins and the loosely piled remains of the upper walls formed a haphazard arch over the weathered wooden door.

Childermass put away his pocket-watch-turned-Compass and knocked on the warped boards. Then he stepped to one side, pressed his back into the corner of the crumbling archway, and assumed the more shadowy form he’d used to spy upon Strange.

The door shuddered in its frame and burst open with a mighty shove. Out of the doorway stepped a woman, as tall as Childermass drawn up to full height. The antlers jutting from her temples made her taller still, the points of their curved branches reaching a good ten inches beyond the crest of her head. Dishwater-blonde hair spilled down her broad shoulders in two thick braids to hang over her front. It provided more coverage than her close-clinging gown, which appeared woven from a combination of cobwebs and dead leaves, its skirt trailing to the ground. Her large brown eyes peered from side to side. They lingered for a moment on the spot where Childermass stood. Childermass held his breath. But the antlered woman merely looked away, turned her back, and walked away into the tower’s shadowed interior. She left the door open behind her. Childermass took it as an invitation.

From the outside, Childermass would have expected to find himself in the small, circular, stone-walled chamber he’d seen when he’d summoned Vinculus’s image in the silver bowl. Upon finding himself in dirt-walled tunnel sloping gently downward and smelling faintly of dead fish,[2] he raised an eyebrow in surprize before he recovered his composure and brought out the Compass again. It pointed him down the tunnel where the antlered woman had led, so he followed them both, measuring his steps to overlap with those of the antlered woman and disguise the thud of his boots against the packed earth.

Time-dulled scales and small, dusty fish bones littered the floor of the tunnel entrance. They became fewer and far between as Childermass and the antlered woman ventured deeper into the earth. Gnarled roots grew out of the walls just where the light from the still-open door began to fade. Someone had stuck the stubs of beeswax candles in the roots’ twists and kinks—or perhaps the roots had grown around them. Their flames, flickering in no draught Childermass could feel, provided all the tunnels’ illumination. By their light the antlered woman’s back appeared concave and hollow beneath her translucent gown.

The tunnel forked. The Compass and the antlered woman led Childermass left, then right, then left again. They passed a low doorway, with a few streams of hickory-scented smoke wafting up from its dark, hidden depths. Through the entrance of another doorway a little further along, Childermass saw a pile of spinning wheels patched together at odd angles, with a single thread winding around them all. The antlered woman paid no heed to these and little more to Childermass himself. Her prongs scraped against the dirt ceilings, dislodging thin, dangling roots for Childermass to dodge in her wake.

They came to a third doorway. The antlered woman stopped in the middle of the tunnel just beyond it, turned to face Childermass, crossed her arms over her chest and stood in the center of the path, staring blankly ahead. She gave no sign she knew Childermass was there.

Childermass consulted the Compass again. It claimed his goal lay further down the tunnel, past the antlered woman’s blockade. Were he a few inches shorter, he might have been able to sneak past her without alerting her to his presence. As matters stood, he and the woman being of an equal size, there was no way he could make forward progress without brushing against her.

Still, she’d left the third doorway open to him. That was something. With a final sideways glance at the antlered woman, he ducked to pass through it.

The chamber he entered was no better illuminated or ventilated than the tunnel leading up to it, though its domed ceiling was higher, allowing Childermass to stand upright to get his bearings. The high ceiling also allowed space for the four posts of the bed in the center of the room. They had been tree roots once. Somehow they contrived to fall into the river that once ran through this land and become driftwood, then a craftsman fitted them into a frame and hung gauzy cobwebs for curtains—or so Childermass concluded from the sight before him. The cobweb curtains did little to hide the man-sized lump in the center of the feather mattress. Many of these feathers poked out of the mattress. Many more had fallen to the ground and formed a downy nest around it. The lump on the bed was likewise feather-covered, though those feathers were not so soft or white. The lump had long, dust-grey feathers, most of which had been brushed the wrong way at least once.

With a gasp, the lump slowly expanded. It contracted with a hiss, broken feathers fluttering in its wake.

Childermass removed his shadow glamor and took a long step towards the bed.

“I am the Reader of the Raven King’s Book,” he said.

The lump quivered. Then, with a fluid rush of feathers, it sat up. A head poked out. By all appearances, the face was that of a pale young man, with skin stretched over high cheekbones and hollow cheeks, and a nose as long as Childermass’s own, though more sharply pointed at the end. But Childermass couldn’t call the eyes human by any standard. Long, featherish brows swooped down over the fairy’s sunken eyes, which, while large, were so dark Childermass could discern no iris or sclera in them—only black pupil. These eyes fixed themselves on Childermass's own and stared. Childermass stared back, taking in the long slate-blue feathers that covered the young man’s scalp in place of hair. They hung down over his bony, emaciated shoulders to brush his collarbone. Something fluttered on his head, sending a rippling iridescence through the feathers. With some effort, Childermass successfully perceived the source. In place of ears were a pair of bird's wings. They'd lain flat at first, only becoming visible when they stretched and re-settled. The rest of the young man’s body did the same, arms emerging from the feathered blanket—for Childermass recognized it as a blanket, and not part of the young man’s body, as he’d initially thought—and showing how the eggshell-pale flesh at the shoulders turned to mottled grey at the elbows and faded to black at the wrists. The blanket fell halfway down the young man’s chest before he caught and pulled it back up to his throat, but not quickly enough to disguise his startling resemblance to a young poet whose once-lean muscles had been devoured by consumption. Regardless, the young man—a fairy, obviously—held his pointed chin high as he regarded Childermass.[3]

Childermass inclined his head a little, the deepest bow he'd ever managed. The fairy returned the gesture.

"You are John Childermass," said the fairy. His voice sounded a bit high and wavered a little, as if underwater, but otherwise mimicked that of any young man of the age he appeared to be.

"You have the advantage of me,” said Childermass. “What should I call you?"

The fairy cocked his head to one side and blinked. Before his two visible lids closed, a third translucent membrane slid sideways across each eye.

"Fisher," he said at last.

"Why have you stolen the Book, Fisher?" said Childermass.

Fisher gave a dry cough that might have been a laugh. "I've stolen nothing. The Book walked into my brugh of its own accord."

"Not in any way lured by one of your servants, I'm sure," said Childermass.

Fisher gave a one-shouldered shrug and a thin half-smile. "My need for the Book is great. It holds the secret to the restoration of my kingdom."

"Can you read it?"

"No," said Fisher, still smiling. "But you can."

It occurred to Childermass that, not unlike Vinculus, he may have walked straight into Fisher's trap. Still, he reckoned himself somewhat cleverer than the street-magician. “And what shall I receive in exchange?”

“Once my kingdom is restored, I will have the means to reward you beyond your wildest imaginings.”

Childermass had never set much store by imagination. “I would prefer the Book.”

Fisher raised a feathery eyebrow. “Then we have an accord?”

“I will read the passages of the Book relevant to the restoration of your kingdom,” said Childermass, determined to make the terms of their agreement as explicit and unambiguous as possible. “In exchange, you will return the Book to my charge, and allow both myself and the Book to return to England unharmed and unchanged.”

“When my kingdom is restored,” said Fisher. “Until then, I am powerless to grant any demands. No matter how loud or insistent they may be.”

Childermass withheld a sigh. “Very well. Where is the Book?”

Fisher appeared reticent to divulge that information.

“I will need to see it to read it,” Childermass reminded him, not bothering to disguise his impatience.

Fisher conceded with a shrug. He lifted his chin to look over Childermass’s shoulder and made a soft trilling sound in his throat. Childermass turned and saw the antlered woman in the doorway. She beckoned him. With a backwards glance at Fisher, who had resettled into a lump on the bed, Childermass followed her back down the hall.

The antlered woman led Childermass deeper underground to tunnels narrower and rougher than those surrounding Fisher’s chamber, with many offshoots. At the point where Childermass had to stoop to avoid catching his long hair in the roots above his head, they came to a stone wall—a dead end.

“If you mean to kill me,” said Childermass, “this would seem the appropriate place and time.”

The antlered woman didn’t so much as flick a pointed ear in the direction of his comment. Instead, she raised her hand to the wall, pressed the tips of her fingers against its rough-hewn surface, and gave a gentle push.

A grinding noise filled the tunnel. The wall slid in a series of jerks, jolts, and slow drags to the left till it exposed an open archway. Beyond this archway, on the stone floor of an otherwise doorless, windowless room, sat Vinculus. He was in the midst of vigorously cleaning his right ear with the tip of his smallest finger and seemed vexed by the interruption.

“About time,” he said, flicking away whatever he’d found in his ear. He yawned and rose with a spine-cracking stretch. “We’re off, then?”

“Not yet,” said Childermass. He turned to the antlered woman. “You know of the bargain I made with your lord?”

She nodded. Childermass supposed that would have to suffice. He stepped into the room.

“Oi!” said Vinculus, a half-second too late for a warning.

Childermass had stepped forward with his right foot. It landed on the floor of the round chamber without incident, so he lifted the left to follow it. Just as his left heel crossed the threshold, the room began to spin. Fresh showers of dirt fell from the trembling ceiling. Childermass stumbled wildly in his efforts to turn around. His training as a seaman helped him find his legs quicker than most, and he managed to reorient himself in time to see the archway shrink down smaller and smaller, until it ground itself out of existence and became a wall.

Vinculus gave a disapproving huff and plopped himself back down on the floor. “Couldn’t have waited another moment, could you?”

“No,” said Childermass, doing his best not to feel trapped. His agreement with Fisher meant he would be released—eventually—with no harm to himself or Vinculus. Escape was assured. Unease was pointless. Still, he stepped up to the wall and ran his fingers over the ragged stones. They held fast and gave no hint they had ever moved.

Vinculus rolled his eyes. “What sort of bargain did you make?”

Childermass, who didn’t consider the answer to that question to be any of Vinculus’s business, replied, “Strip.”

Vinculus required no further prompting to stand up and peel all his clothes off. He tossed them to the floor as he went. They fell into a sort of nest around him. When the last scrap of cloth tumbled down, he raised his arms and grinned as if awaiting praise for the feat of disrobing.

He would wait forever. Childermass had already moved on to examining the marks on Vinculus’s skin. Vinculus heaved a theatrical sigh and dropped his arms, missing Childermass’s shoulder by a narrow margin. Childermass flicked his eyes up from Vinculus’s bare chest to meet his gaze with a raised eyebrow of disapproval. He didn’t wait to see if Vinculus looked abashed in response, instead stepping around to examine Vinculus’s shoulder.

The Learned Society of York Magicians had already mapped out a great deal of the King’s Book. But while all could see the marks, and many had copied them down into their personal memorandum books, few among them could claim in any way to truly Read the text. Miss Redruth was one. Childermass was another. He’d already decoded a fair number of the most frequently recurring symbols on Vinculus’s skin. In the likely event this would prove insufficient, he supposed he would simply have to learn to Read more. Of all the trials and tribulations he’d faced in life, he thought this would prove the least unpleasant.

The fairy prison had no sun, no clocks, no timepieces of any kind—save for Childermass’s own pocket-watch, which he’d turned into the Compass and had thus made useless for keeping track of the hours. His study of the Book continued long enough for the Book to grumble about aches and pains in the Book’s joints and ravenous hunger in the Book’s guts. Just as Vinculus’s complaints tried Childermass’s patience to its limits, the room spun again. The wall opened to reveal the spiderish creature Childermass had seen crouched in the willow. Two of its arms held a wooden tray of smoked salmon. A third arm clamped a dusty wine bottle. It placed all of this on the prison floor without stepping through the archway or acknowledging the room’s occupants.

“Thank you,” said Childermass. “You may tell your master we’ve made progress. How should I inform him when I’ve succeeded?”

Five of its eight eyes blinked, not quite in unison. It opened its mouth to reveal more clattering teeth than a mouth ought to hold, and spoke with a strange clicking sound from its throat.

“He’ll know.”

With that, it turned and left Childermass to his work.

Vinculus had grabbed the wine bottle while Childermass and the creature talked. Childermass turned back to find him brushing cobwebs off the bottle’s neck and blowing them away from the cork. The spider-thing hadn’t left any cups or glasses behind. They would have to share the bottle. Childermass held out his hand, determined to have the first sip before Vinculus’s cracked lips and black-spotted teeth had touched it. Vinculus glared at him, then handed the bottle over. Childermass pulled the cork out with his teeth, spat it into his right hand, and tilted the bottle to his lips with his left. A hearty mouthful of it went down his throat before he realized how very close the wine had come to vinegar over the course of Fisher’s ruined reign. He didn’t spit, but pulled the bottle away, swallowed all he’d taken, and held the bottle out to Vinculus _sans_ comment. Vinculus grabbed it unceremoniously and tilted his head back to receive the refreshment. A petulant part of Childermass had hoped to see Vinculus served right for his greed, but Vinculus drained the bottle as if it were champagne. Then he plunged his hands into the smoked salmon. Childermass left him to it. When Vinculus had finished his dinner—or, for all Childermass knew of the passage of time in this place, his breakfast—Childermass bid him stand again with a jerk of his chin. Vinculus obeyed with a put-upon sigh.

Hours, or perhaps even days later, Childermass found the answer behind Vinculus’s left knee. He blinked at it in surprize. The legend it referenced dated back to the age of England’s first kings, centuries before the reign of John Uskglass. Mr Norrell would have dismissed it as mere sentimental fancy. Childermass knew better.

“Well?” said Vinculus when Childermass stood. “What is it, then?”

“A spell,” said Childermass.

“Figured that much out for m’self, thanks,” said Vinculus.

Childermass ignored him and turned to face the wall. The now-familiar grinding had already begun. He’d felt its first rumblings while he’d knelt on the floor, eyebrow raised in disbelief at what Fisher’s quest would require of him. Now, having rearranged his long, crooked face to give no hint that he’d ever been taken off-guard, he waited.

The archway opened. The antlered woman stood on the other side. Her large brown eyes wandered from Childermass to Vinculus and back again. Then she turned and walked away down the tunnel, leaving the archway open behind her. Childermass followed her out. Vinculus followed Childermass and made it six inches over the threshold into the tunnel before the antlered woman whirled around.

Childermass quick-stepped out of her path. Apparently he hadn’t stepped far enough for her liking, for she slammed him back against the dirt wall with one hand as she rushed past him to get to Vinculus.

The blow forced all wind from Childermass’s lungs. He stumbled to the ground, his long fingers clutching at the crumbling wall behind him in his attempts to remain upright, and gasped to get his breath back. She ignored him, intent on her prey.

Vinculus, quick on the uptake, ducked down to dash past her. She proved fleeter still, and caught him under the shoulders without breaking stride, then thrust him back into the cell. He fell onto the flagstones, somersaulted once, then scrambled up—apparently unharmed—to protest her treatment of him with vehemence. But the chamber had already begun to turn, and the grinding of the closing archway soon drowned out his indignant yells.

The antlered woman, meanwhile, turned her back on him and continued on her way up the tunnel stone-faced.

Childermass had regained his footing by this point and stood with as much dignity as he could muster—which, to his credit, was a fair amount, considering the rumpling of his clothes and the dirt in his hair. He followed her away from the prison cell.

Fisher remained huddled in misery under the feathered blanket, just as Childermass had left him. The antlered woman, having delivered Childermass to her master, departed in silence. Childermass announced himself by clearing his throat. Fisher sat up again, the blanket drawn close over his shoulders, with only his head and thin neck poking out.

“You’ve found the answer?” said Fisher.

“Show me your wound,” said Childermass.

Fisher gave another three-lidded blink. Then he reached out for one of the bedposts and pulled himself into a standing position. With a shrug, he dislodged the blanket. It fell half on the bed and half on the floor and laid all his flesh bare beneath Childermass’s gaze.

Most of Fisher’s skin remained smooth and pale. But where a navel would sit on any other man’s trunk, there began a massive scar. It traveled south over his concave gut to dip between his narrow, jutting hips and terminate halfway down the inside of his left thigh. At either end it narrowed to a needle’s width, puffy and pink. Its middle darkened to an angry reddish-purple and gaped as wide as the breadth of Childermass’s palm. Beneath the wound a smallish prick hung utterly inert.[4]

The spell described on the back of Vinculus’s left knee differed from the stories Black Joan had told her children. According to legend, the cure to Fisher’s ailment required a chalice and a spear. Fisher’s chamber held neither. Though, thought Childermass as he undid his own trousers and pulled out his prick, he seemed to have a spear to hand after all.

Fisher didn’t seem surprized by this turn of events. He did, however, look intensely interested.

Childermass let his eyes wander over Fisher’s emaciated frame as he stroked himself halfway to hardness. When this less-than-inspiring sight failed to produce the desired result, he closed his eyes and thought of the other men and women he’d known in the course of his romantic life.[5]

With his eyes closed and his mind on sailors and housemaids, Childermass hardly heard the flutter of shifting feathers or the soft tapping of footsteps on the packed earth floor. But he would have had to be, in his own words, a very dull fellow not to notice the soft lips pressing against his own cracked, half-parted ones. They opened wider in surprize, and Fisher took advantage of the opportunity to flick his tongue into Childermass’s mouth. Childermass let him.

Shortly after, Childermass felt a faint pinching sensation on his shoulders. He opened his eyes to see Fisher’s thin fingers clutching at his jacket with a trembling grip. Childermass didn’t pity him for his weakness. He did, however, find it difficult to concentrate on onanism when his insistent partner was in danger of collapsing at any moment, so he wrapped an arm around Fisher’s waist and gave him a gentle nudge back towards the bed. Fisher complied without complaint.

Atop the feather mattress—much softer than it first appeared—Childermass lay Fisher down on his back and knelt astride his thighs. Then he reapplied his hand to his prick with vigor, rolling the length of it in his rough palm, pulling the foreskin back and forth over the head. Beneath him, Fisher bit a bright-red lip in anticipation. The sight of sharp white teeth on supple flesh did more than the thought of a hundred housemaids to firm up Childermass’s cockstand. He dove down impulsively to cover that vulnerable mouth and worry those soft lips between his own teeth. Fisher responded with enthusiasm.

Preoccupied with that violent kiss, Childermass was caught uncharacteristically unawares once more when Fisher’s frail hand found its way to his cock. Thin, soft fingers wrapped around the length before Childermass could do more than gasp in surprise. The fingers tightened into a fist and pulled. Childermass’s mouth fell open in a silent, breathless cry as he turned his head to the side to bury his cheek in the mattress. With his lips pressed against Fisher’s slender throat, he could feel Fisher’s fluttering breath as his hand wrung unspeakable sensations from Childermass’s prick. He thrust into that soft, tight fist till the pressure in his groin built up like an overwound music-box, and he pushed Fisher’s hand away before the mechanism shattered. He leaned back on his haunches, looking down upon the curve of Fisher’s warm lips, and let his own hand bring him to his crisis.

As diverting as the exercise was, Childermass couldn’t afford to lose himself in the sensation. Thighs trembling with exertion, chest heaving, sweat prickling on his shivering skin, he forced himself to focus on his task. Thus, he just managed to catch his own seed in his palm as he spent. He would have used a grail in accordance with the legends of old, but there wasn’t one to hand, and the Book had made no mention of it.

He could feel Fisher’s fascinated gaze upon him like heat pouring off of a blazing bonfire--and ignored it, intent on his work. He dipped two fingers into the mess on his palm, then moved them to the scar on Fisher’s stomach. Fisher, to his credit, held himself still, though his flesh reflexively flinched away from the swiftly-cooling seed coating Childermass’s fingers. Childermass furrowed his brow in concentration as he smeared his semen over Fisher’s wound.[6]

The spell didn’t cause the scar to disappear. Nor did it shrink. But it faded a little, and more importantly, Fisher took his first full breath in all the hours Childermass had known him. He let it out in a quivering sigh of relief. Below the wound, his smallish prick twitched to life.

Childermass wasn’t vain enough to believe he alone was capable of successfully casting the spell and completing the quest. Still, a small flare of satisfaction and accomplishment flickered in the back of his mind, and he allowed himself to bask in it for a moment as a reward for a job well done. Then he turned his attention back to Fisher’s cock, now at half-mast.

Since Childermass had been the one to awaken Fisher’s cockstand, he supposed it was his responsibility to take care of it. To that end, he leaned in to press his own cracked lips to Fisher’s. He let his hand trail over the length of Fisher’s prick and felt it pulse against his fingertips in recognition. Likewise, the rest of Fisher rose up to meet his caresses.

Then, as fast as a salmon leaping from the stream into the air and falling back to its watery home, Fisher flipped Childermass onto his back and straddled his hips.

Considering Fisher’s emaciated frame, Childermass didn’t expect him to weigh overmuch. Even so, he weighed hardly half what Childermass had expected. It was as if his bones were hollow. Childermass could feel almost nothing of his mass, save the teasing brush of Fisher’s cock against his own soft one. And yet, though Childermass still felt the customary weariness that followed release, his prick twitched to life again. Before he could question it, Fisher bent forward to trap both cocks between their bellies and began to move his hips in earnest. The slick trail Childermass had left on Fisher’s scar still leaked from his own confused prick, providing more than enough grease to allow their cocks to slide together in smooth, delicious friction.

Childermass would have been content to enjoy this exercise for as long as Fisher saw fit to continue it. But Fisher canted his hips forward and Childermass’s cock slipped behind Fisher’s prick into—he knew not what. Holgarth and Pickle had never delved so deep into fairy anatomy.[7] Regardless, it was warm and soft and slick like a cunt, so Childermass decided he might as well call it such for the time being.

Fisher’s cunt welcomed Childermass’s cock with a grip that threatened to milk his seed from him the moment he entered it. He grabbed Fisher’s shoulders hard enough to bruise in his efforts to hold back, his breath coming in ragged gasps. A blasphemous oath in the name of the Raven King spilled from his throat. He clenched his teeth against more unseemly outbursts, determined to ride it out with what little dignity remained to him. Even so, between the tight sheath Fisher provided and the tingling trail of magical sensation left behind as Fisher’s hands ran over his bare skin, Childermass couldn’t last long. Pressure coiled below his navel, his muscles spasmed, his prick twitched, his stones drew up and then—

Fisher put a finger over Childermass’s open, gasping mouth.

“Not yet,” he said.

A hundred other voices spoke with him, some Latin, some French, some Welsh, more in languages Childermass couldn’t recognize, all heavy with magic.

And everything stopped.

Childermass still felt all he had before. The tight grip of Fisher’s slick cunt walls around his cock. The catch of his breath burning in his throat. The terrible, glorious ache in his groin, begging for release. But that release was denied him.

Fisher’s hips rolled.

Childermass thought he might die.

He would have gleefully slit his own throat if it could bring on his own release—and yet, he never wanted it to end. Every pounding beat of his heart cast his mind back and forth between these two contrary desires. If it continued much longer, he would surely be driven mad. He wasn’t entirely sure he’d object to madness, if it could feel like this.

Above him, Fisher rode him as if he were a warhorse, and with about as much concern for his pleasure. He only paused his hectic gallop to bend forward and lock his lips with Childermass's for a tantalizing moment. Then he reared up again and threw back his head, baring his throat.

Childermass, his vision swimming, made to lift himself up to meet Fisher. He just managed to get his elbows under him before Fisher’s palm came down upon his chest and pinned him to the bed. Childermass grabbed Fisher’s thighs in retaliation, long, callused fingers gripping hard enough to leave blue-black bruises in their wake. Fisher, with his head back and his eyes shut, responded only with a silent, open-mouthed laugh.

When he could stand it no longer, Childermass darted one hand forward to take hold of Fisher’s prick. Fisher's eyes flew open at that, but he made no move to stop him. Quite the opposite. He thrust his hips upward to meet Childermass's touch.

Childermass got in one clever twist of his hand around Fisher’s length—then Fisher clenched around him, hard. It became a full-body shudder, a convulsion, his spine arching and hips twitching. His cock throbbed in Childermass's fist and, with a stifled shout, he spilled his seed in an arc across Childermass's chest. In the same instant, Childermass felt himself pushed over the edge of the precipice on which Fisher had balanced him.

It lasted an instant; it lasted an age; it lasted longer than his nerves could stand; it couldn’t last long enough. A hundred wings rushed in his ears and became the roar of a surging, torrential waterfall. His consciousness narrowed to the pressure on his cock, the twist behind his navel, and the Galvanic tremors rushing up and down his spine. The last thing he saw was Fisher above him, back arched in ecstasy, mouth open, throat gasping in Sidhe, still coming. Childermass spent with the force of a storm-wracked sea crashing down on a powerless shore. Fisher’s hot cunt welcomed the spill of his seed and milked him for more, till the pleasure turned toward the edge of pain. Then Childermass’s eyes rolled back into his head and all was darkness.

Childermass awoke to a sensation of overpowering warmth and gentle, flickering light. He opened his eyes in a squint and found himself in a luxurious bed covered in a comforter of bright blue feathers and hung with cream-colored silk curtains. Through the curtains came the fluttering, reddish light of a roaring fire. Childermass frowned at it and reached out to pull the curtains aside. This revealed a blazing hearth set into a dirt wall, flanked on both sides by tapestries worked in every shade of blue, each depicting an enormous trout impaled on a spear.

“Hail and well met,” said a voice behind him.

Childermass rolled over to regard a young man lying beside him in the bed. The young man had propped his head up on one elbow and regarded Childermass with a manic, sharp-toothed grin. The expression would have appeared unsettling, had it not lay in the most handsome face Childermass had ever seen, with high cheekbones, a long, regal nose, and a sharp, strong jaw. The young man was entirely naked, all his lean, well-formed musculature and richly tanned flesh on display. The feathers on his head shimmered with cerulean iridescence. The little wings on either side of his head stretched and shivered in an expression of excitement. Only by the eyes, which glittered with new brightness but maintained their unsettling black depths, could Childermass recognize Fisher. And only through recognizing Fisher could he realize he lay in the very same bed he’d collapsed in, in the very same room, all transformed by the spell he’d worked on the Fisher King.

Childermass raised an eyebrow at him. Fisher laughed.

“I owe you a great debt,” said Fisher, teeth flashing like sunlight glancing off a rushing stream. “From now on you shall be my consort and seneschal. Together we will restore this kingdom to its former glory, and—”

“I already have a king,” said Childermass.

Fisher, taken aback, gave his queer, three-lidded blink. He recovered himself with a chuckle. “Loyalties change, and Christian loyalties more than most.”

With that, he lifted one hand to stroke through Childermass’s tangled locks, and lowered the other to graze his soft prick. Childermass gave him a stone-faced stare in return.

“We had a bargain,” said Childermass.

The smile fell from Fisher’s face like a stone plummeting down a well. He gave a huff of impatience and tossed his glossy head-feathers. When that failed to arouse Childermass’s sympathies, he pouted. And when that, too, failed, he drew in a deep breath and heaved the heaviest, loudest, and most theatrical sigh Childermass had ever heard.

“Fine,” said Fisher. The single syllable dripped with ice. He rolled away across the mattress to quite literally turn his back on Childermass and, without looking, made a rolling gesture with his wrist towards the door. “Take your Book and go.”

Childermass gathered up his clothes from the floor and pulled them on, brushing off dirt and biting off loose threads as he went. His left boot took a few minutes to find. It turned up under Fisher’s bed, a fact which seemed to cause Fisher no end of disappointment. Throughout the process, Fisher continued to heave world-weary sighs. Childermass continued to ignore them. When he’d finished putting himself back together, he shoved his tangled hair out of his face with one hand and pulled out the Compass with the other. It pointed at the tunnel beyond the door. Childermass turned to the lump on the bed.

“Thank you,” he said.

Fisher scoffed.

A crooked smile wound its way up one side of Childermass’s cheek. Without further ado, he went on his way.[8]

Childermass had expected the Compass to lead him back to the round prison cell. Instead, it directed him back up towards the entrance. About halfway there, the hand-turned-needle spun sharply to his left and pointed out a doorway he hadn’t noticed on his way into the brugh. Nothing illuminated the room beyond it. Childermass looked from the watch-face to the doorway again, pulled a beeswax candle from a crook in the roots lining the walls, and crept in.

The candlelight flickered down on a small subterranean chamber, round like all the others, with the entire floor covered in moss, feathers, and furs to create a kind of nest. Under a bearskin lay two entangled figures. One had antlers. The other, from what Childermass saw of its right leg extending from under the furs, had blue skin.

“Vinculus,” said Childermass. “Get up.”

The blue leg disappeared back under the bearskin like a fox into a hole. Childermass reached out for the bearskin and yanked it off the nest. Vinculus lay curled in the middle of it with the antlered woman nestled around him and his head pillowed between her ample bosom. They were both entirely naked, which on her part revealed cloven hooves in place of human feet. She glared at Childermass.

“You have my pardon for the interruption,” said Childermass. “But I’ve fulfilled my end of your master’s bargain, and I require the Book in payment.”

The antlered woman gave him a blank look. Then, in a single fluid motion, she simultaneously snatched the bearskin back from him and shoved Vinculus away from her. He tumbled across the nest towards the door with a shout of protest. Both Childermass and the antlered woman ignored it.

Childermass grabbed Vinculus by the hair to pull him to his feet, despite the ensuing cacophony, and dragged him by the elbow into the hall. Vinculus’s discarded clothes came after them, hurled through the air by the antlered woman. His boots in particular flew dangerously close to Childermass’s head.

When Vinculus had re-dressed himself, accompanied by the music of his own grumbling complaints, Childermass took out the Compass again and led them up through the labyrinthine brugh towards the surface. They stopped at the door Childermass had come in through, though he hardly recognized it. No longer warped and weather-beaten to a dull grey, it now had bright green varnish and a bright copper handle. Still, it took considerable effort to open. The combination of Vinculus and Childermass’s shoulders did the trick, and they stumbled out into the open air.

And the rain.

Rain poured down from the sky as if the thunderous clouds hid a waterfall behind their dense black bulk. The trees reached up to it like grateful beggars receiving a shower of alms. Already their branches had begun to bud with new leaves, and some had even sprouted into dark green life. The grass mimicked their revival, shooting up its own wide blades to grow slick with the downpour. Off in the distance, the roar of the renewed river rivaled the cacophony of the torrent from the skies.

Vinculus turned his complaints from a grumble to a grouse. Childermass, meanwhile, looked up into what he’d wrought and let it wash some of the mud and sweat from his face. Then he stepped forward, trusting Vinculus to follow him. Vinculus, having nowhere else to go, did.

* * *

Some months after Vinculus was returned to the study of the Learned Society of York Magicians, Childermass left a bookshop in London and heard a short, sharp whistle from above his head. It repeated itself three times as he looked up.

A kingfisher perched on the bar holding the swinging sign over the door of the shop. Upon locking its deep black eyes with Childermass’s own, it ruffled its bright blue feathers and chirruped again.

“I believe I answered you already, sir,” said Childermass.

The kingfisher cocked its head to one side.

“The answer was ‘no’,” Childermass informed it.

The kingfisher’s beak was a flat, solid thing of black bone. As such, it hadn’t the freedom of movement required to mimic the change of expression in a human face. Still, Childermass would have sworn it frowned as it gave another questionable whistle.

“No,” said Childermass, and turned away to continue walking down the street.

A blow came down on the back of his head with a muffled _thwump_. He clamped a hand to his skull as he looked wildly around for the source, and witnessed a blue-feathered blur whirling away into the sky. He straightened as he watched it fade into a speck and disappear entirely.

Childermass supposed it served him right, and strode on.

* * *

1 Invented by Catherine of Winchester, the Winchester Compass leads the caster to the person, place, or object of their choosing. It requires a small, slender, pointed object to be held in one’s palm and left free to spin. Catherine of Winchester used a sewing needle centered in a circle drawn in her hand. Childermass repurposed his pocket-watch. It was made of pewter, with cracked glass over its face and the initials “J. C.” engraved on the back by sheer coincidence—Childermass had acquired it from a pawn shop.[return to text]

2 “A hole is burrowed in a bank, and the nest is at the end of a gallery—never apparently less than two feet in length and sometimes as much as fifteen—which often turns at a sharp angle, and is sometimes said to be tortuous. Occasionally it would seem to be furnished with twigs, grass and feathers, though most commonly without anything more than fishes' bones and scales.” — Thomas Bewick, _A History of British Birds_ [return to text]

3 As Childermass studied the fairy, so the fairy studied Childermass. Thus, the fairy in turn saw that a dark, lanky Christian had entered his bedchamber, with half-lidded sardonic eyes, long black hair as ragged as sword-slashed silk, and cheeks peppered with rough black stubble. He saw that the Christian’s long fingers were capped with filthy black nails, and watched them twitch with well-practiced dexterity when the Christian thought he wasn’t looking. He saw the Christian’s long, strong limbs shift with the grace of a feral cat. He saw how the Christian’s long, thin slash of a mouth could curl up one side of his face or the other, depending on his wont, and seeing this, the fairy had to suppress a wide smile of his own. [return to text]

4 Had Childermass been a medical man, he might have made the physiological connection between the scar and the fairy’s impotence. The abdominal muscles overlap those controlling the movement of the phallus. This accounts for the phenomenon of involuntary erections during disembowelment. It is more than likely the location of Fisher’s scar and its considerable size interfered with bloodflow to his erectile tissue. But Childermass was not a medical man, and so he assumed the cause of Fisher’s ailment to be magical. In either case, the solution was the same. [return to text]

5 Childermass never gave much thought to his own _sexuality_ , as modern scholars would term it. He spent his adolescence assuming all other men and boys felt much the same as he did—that some women were attractive, some men were also attractive, and if one were to meet with persons somewhere in the middle or outside of bounds entirely, some among their number would likely be attractive as well. He chalked up the predominant narrative of men with women and women with men to mere social convention. As he had never given much consideration to social convention, he felt no cause for concern. Still, like the majority of his thoughts, he kept these musings to himself.

His first experience with another man had been at the age of fifteen. He’d earned two shillings by it, which made Black Joan’s decision to slap him when she heard of it all the more puzzling. According to what Childermass knew of his Bible and of English law, sodomy was no more or less a crime or sin than pickpocketing. Nevertheless, he knew better than to question her judgment and took himself away to sea instead. There he found other individuals who, judging by their behavior towards him and their fellows, held the same unspoken views on fucking as himself. The rest of his history, barring a few illustrative but repetitive instances, is well known: acquiring the Cards of Marseilles from a fellow sailor renewed his youthful talent and taste for magic, which inspired him to return to England and enter Mr Norrell’s service. While there he found little time to spare for romantic pursuits towards any particular sex—though this did not prevent several known women (the housemaids Lucy, Hannah, and Dido, in addition to one of Vinculus’s wives) and probably several unknown men from developing tender feelings towards him in the meantime. [return to text]

6 Blood is the bodily fluid most commonly used as a magical component, but it is not the only possible spell ingredient in that category. Tears are nearly as famous, followed by saliva and finally semen. It is thought semen would rank higher on the list were it not for more conservative magicians’ reluctance to name it openly in their receipts. [return to text]

7 Here Childermass erred in his assumption. Holgarth and Pickle had indeed delved just as deeply into fairy anatomy, if not moreso, which formed part of the reason why Mr Norrell considered them so disreputable. However, as they did not divulge their entire breadth of knowledge in their seminal work ( _Curiose Observations upon the Anatomie of Faeries_ ), Childermass remained ignorant of how much he held in common with them. [return to text]

8 Fisher ought to have given Childermass a sword in recompense for his services. However, Fisher was not in a giving mood, and Childermass was not particularly inclined to prompt him. If the legends held true, the sword would have probably broken anyway. [return to text]

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Kaesa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaesa) for beta-reading and [La_Temperanza](http://archiveofourown.org/users/La_Temperanza/pseuds/La_Temperanza) for the guide [How to Make Linked Footnotes on AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4579026?style=creator&view_full_work=true).


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